George Martin's work is so full of blood and gore, and huge dollops of sex almost ladled in that it makes difficult reading. It certainly is a gripping tale otherwise. I started reading it but stopped, for a peculiar reason. Reading the successive volumes of The Wheel of Time, there were moments towards the end when I wondered if the damn' thing would finish faster or I would. Now, having started this series and got to the little fellow being exiled, I've stopped reading it. Let all the volumes be printed first, and then we'll see.
It's strange you should be comparing it with Tolkien. Tolkien (I first read LOTR in 1968, the year of revolution all over the world) is so poetic, and his writing so marvellously precise. His intimacy with English as she is spoke is remarkable, and he reaches right into the heart of the language, into its Middle and Old English vocabularies, for his priceless words.
I have always been reminded by Tolkien of the writings of John Buchan in the Richard Hannay series, in that the transition from a perfectly normal, almost boring and comfort-filled life to a thrilling series of adventures takes place in about 30 pages in both. We start celebrating a birthday party, and take stock of a series of eccentric characters in LOTR, and through an almost imperceptible change of pace, find ourselves holding our breath not to attract the attention of the horse of one of the Black Riders, or galloping madly for sanctuary in an elvish stronghold. In Buchan, we move from plus-fours and the difficulties of a particular stalk of a fine stag to high adventure, where the fates of clashing armies depend on the success or failure of an almost impossible mission.
Reader Alert: Hannay has his purple passages where mad mullahs whip an intensely religious population into a frenzy, and reflects the fear of contemporary colonial administrators fairly accurately. From the point of view of a south Asian reader, fairly annoyingly as well.
